Initiated Read online

  “I’ve never met anybody so ready to be exceptional,” he continued. It sounds like a line, writing it, but the way he said it felt real. For many years afterward, I cradled that line, I clung to it when I felt like I was no one, that I’d never get anywhere, worrying that I might be lost in the underworld forever. He drew his fingers to my collarbones and looked me in the eyes. Despite his arrogance, there was something angelic about him. His big eyes, so vulnerable and innocent. I looked past him and the stars were still there. Hanging. Everywhere. As if they were in a jelly. The sky hadn’t stopped falling. I felt dizzy. The universe was splitting apart.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “That hum. Like everything is vibrating.” He shook his head and I could feel his spirit retract back into his shell. “Whoosh,” I said. I could hear the universal hum, the rhythmic pulse of the universe, and around the edges I could hear wings beating. The waves and the wind and my pulse and his all mixing, all thrumming in the same rhythm. “Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh,” I said. I don’t know what happened, I just wanted to sing along to the music. It seemed beautiful, ecstatic. Like maybe finding oblivion really should be our goal as humans after all.

  With a twitch, Adrian leapt up, afraid. “I think we should go,” he said. “It’s getting cold.” His fear triggered my own. I stumbled along behind him, cold sand kicking up into my eyes as he powered back to the car.

  We got in and slammed the doors, shivering in the dark, trying to catch our breath. We began the drive home in silence. After a while, I put on a mixtape my friend had made me that included a bunch of songs from the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. I’d been impressed by that tape; the music felt urgent, destructive, clashing and clanging, fatal and foreign. Adrian asked me who it was, and I was proud to tell him. Proud that I knew about something he didn’t. He frowned and nodded, silent for a moment, then sighed. “I’ve never heard them sound so pop before,” he said. Soon after that night, he stopped returning my phone calls.

  What happened that night? Was I really hearing the universal hum? Was I just some eighteen-year-old weirdo who wanted to impress her date by acting like a lunatic? Did I start to disassociate when threatened with real intimacy? Can I say yes to all of it? Whatever the truth of that night was, the hum didn’t stop on the beach, and the sky didn’t stop falling. I was still haunted, so porous I could crack open, a fibrous plant full of holes. As my time wore on in San Francisco, any spirit that wanted to visit me could visit me. I couldn’t say no. I brought home strangers whose names I don’t remember. I had no boundaries. I would sit for hours hypnotized by the spirits coming out of the ceiling and the sky.

  In the house on Fulton Street, I would have the sense that I was being watched by a malevolent spirit. Usually I would go upstairs and hang out with William in his room until the feeling passed. But sometimes it wouldn’t pass. And I would creep down the hall and enter my room and the presence would be so thick, I’d just have to leave the house.

  One rainy day I was alone. The sky danced in low wisps outside my window and I heard a pulse in my room, those same wings beating. I left the house in an effort to escape to Cafe Abir a few blocks away, but as I darted down the street, I could feel the presence above me, hear its silk clashing wings, see its shadow following me on the sidewalk. “The angel of death, the angel of death, the angel of death,” the words flashed loudly in my mind like a traffic signal. I tried to walk like an ordinary person but couldn’t. I sprinted to the café and threw myself inside, heart racing, collapsing at a table, only leaving when the café closed at 10:00 p.m.

  Eventually, hearing the vulnerability in my voice on one of our phone calls, my mother asked me if I wanted to “go somewhere to rest” but we both knew that wasn’t possible. We didn’t have any money to send me to some kind of garden sanatorium with fountains à la Vincent van Gogh. We were broke. If I got put away somewhere, it would most likely be somewhere with bars on the windows and a TV in the rec room bolted to the wall.

  Into Donna’s old room moved Neil, a stocky white Taurus with a shaved head who studied Chinese medicine. He kept Indonesian masks on his wall—the kind with wide, wrathful eyes and grimacing mouths—and noise music droning in his room at all hours, day or night. Both of these were supposed to keep the demons in the house out of his business. Neil practiced tai chi, a martial art that aims to help you master your flow of energy and find your center, two essential practices if you want to be a person of power, not knocked off balance by outside forces.

  Neil was able to withstand the influence of the house egregore because he was practicing tools of self-mastery. All cultures have them, but in order for these tools to work, you can’t just know about them; you have to practice. A big part of being a witch is learning how to hold your ground and take on influence only with awareness. Since my time on Fulton Street, I’ve learned a thing or two about guarding against toxic intimacy with egregores, or anyone else. Now, before I enter into any kind of relationship, whether it be with a person, place, or thing, I ask myself, “Do I want to take on this influence?” I consider who the influence will encourage me to become. The egregore is always pulling you toward itself, encouraging you to become more like it. Our magical practice encourages us to move toward liberation. It helps us create space and empower ourselves. The daily practices of witchcraft—grounding, centering, shielding, incantations, ritual offerings to enlist the help of our spirit allies—all remind us that we have agency. These practices can help us establish healthy boundaries and remind us that we are not at the mercy of outside forces.

  If I lived on Fulton Street now, I would fumigate my room daily with banishing smoke like white copal, frankincense, or dragon’s blood. I’d call upon my spirit guardians to protect my space, and I’d leave them offerings of incense and fresh water as thanks. I’d bless black salt and spring water, then use the mixture to inscribe warding symbols on my doors, windows, and mirrors: a pentacle for blessings, the Algiz rune for protection. I’d clean the place up and remove any clutter, which is where stagnant, corrupt spirits like to hide. I’d recite the Consecration of the Sanctuary, one of my favorite protective prayers, borrowed and adapted from the syncretic cult of Santo Daime. There is only one presence here, it is Love. Everyone who enters here will feel the pure and holy presence of Love…I’d mind my own energy and if I found myself slipping out of balance, I’d do everything necessary to restore myself to a state of mental, physical, and emotional equilibrium. I’d see healers, meditate, dance, cleanse my diet, call upon my community for love and support. Finally, on my altar, I’d create a council of elders: images of sages and deities whom I wanted to call into my sphere and be intimate with, egregores whose influence upon me I’d joyfully encourage.

  All of these practices help create harmony in your environment and make it more difficult for troublesome egregores to gain hold. Kind of like how if you don’t want mold in your bathroom, the best thing to do is keep it clean, dry, and well maintained. But some bathrooms are too dumpy to keep clean, and sometimes a place is just too corrupted to be restored. In that case, the best thing a witch can do for herself is leave.

  After about six months of living there, I came to understand that Colette, priestess to the egregore of the house on Fulton Street, was struggling with heroin addiction. The first time I saw Colette high, she was in the upstairs bathroom hand-washing one of her mauve mohair sweaters in the bathtub, her pale blue eyes suddenly pupil-less, with an atmosphere of gauze or fog around her. “You look different,” I told her, studying all her details. “Did you get a haircut?” I’d never seen anyone on heroin before. Now I know you can recognize the heroin spirit by the veil it lays across a person’s eyes. When a person is on opioids, you can never really speak to them directly; you always speak first to the corrupt Spirit of the Poppy.

  Colette was under the influence of the heroin poppy. Plants have spirits, just like humans do. Like all sentient beings, plants have an agenda
, things they want. They want intimacy, connection, and they have territory to claim. They want to spread their seed. Plants have desires. Sentient beings influence each other. People can influence the plant spirits, modify and manipulate them until they become corrupted. Many narcotics are corrupt plant spirits. When you come under the influence of a corrupt spirit, you become their servant. And a servant to the egregore that caused their corruption in the first place. People under the influence of corrupt spirits can rarely maintain healthy relationships. There isn’t enough room in their lives. The corrupt spirits want everything from their humans, until there’s nothing left for them to give.

  I caught a glimpse of the Fulton Street egregore once when Colette threw a fit and threatened to heave herself off the Golden Gate Bridge. It began with the smell of smoke and maniacal screams wuthering down from the attic. William ran up the stairs and we heard him through the floorboards, gentling her, speaking as if to a wounded animal. But soon Colette came tearing down the staircase, skinning the banisters with her sharp nails. Alex and I barred the front door to prevent her from leaving. She hissed and spat and clawed at us, eyes black with rage, the house egregore trying to get out of her body before she could make it out the front door, screaming that she hated us and wished we were dead.

  Raised by a Unitarian witch, I had no strong feelings about Catholicism; I saw it as the most pagan form of Christianity, but beyond that, I knew little. Up the hill from my house, Saint Ignatius Church stood guard on the corner of Fulton and Parker. Not long after seeing Colette possessed by the egregore, I felt called by the Virgin Mary, who lived in one of its side chapels. Candlelit, mainly empty except for a few solitary worshippers, I sat there in the silence, waiting, neutral. Within moments, I was bawling. Huge, heaving sobs. Tears gushing from my eyes. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with all the heartbreak and beauty of the world; I could feel all its suffering. I wept over everything and nothing in particular, until my eyes were purpled with veins and bruises and almost swollen shut, until an old woman came up to me and laid her hand on my shoulder and told me that whatever was wrong, if I prayed to the Virgin, she would help me. As a witch, I don’t distinguish between goddesses. All are avatars of The Goddess, source of all love and all life. The Virgin Mary is the same as the Virgin Diana, is the same as Aphrodite, Ishtar, and Isis; when you look at her from different angles, you see her different facets shine. When the old woman looked in my eyes and smiled, I saw Hecate, Guardian of the Crossroads. I began to trust that somehow, someday, she would show me the path out of the underworld, to a place where I was safe and happy and free.

  A couple weeks later, Alex the mathematician took me to see Stomp at a music hall in Berkeley. Athletic young New Yorkers swung like spiders across the stage, pounding on walls and lids and buckets and whatever else was around. Their rhythm shook our bones and put us in some kind of a healing trance. Shamans throughout history have used drumming to induce trances. Recent studies with EEG machines have found that drumming can cause changes in your brain waves and central nervous system, bringing about feelings of euphoria and lucidity. In other words, drumming inspires shamanic states of consciousness. After the show, Alex and I emerged back onto the Berkeley streets, grinning. I could feel my full spirit flickering in every cell. The egregore’s spell was broken. The drumming broke it. Simultaneously, Alex and I turned to face each other. “We can move!” we both exclaimed. Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to either of us that we could leave the house on Fulton Street.

  We put an ad in the paper for my room, and the next morning at 5:00 a.m., inquiring phone calls began nonstop. Dot-com had hit. My room with the bay windows and the poltergeists went from $400 per month to $1,200 per month overnight.

  After I left, the person who moved into my room had a psychic friend over to stay. William told me that the psychic had to leave in the middle of the night because she couldn’t sleep. All night long spirits kept pulling at her clothes, gnashing their teeth, and chattering.

  On a recent trip to San Francisco, I decided to walk by the old house on Fulton Street. As I drew nearer, a cold fire erupted in my belly; my feet became heavy and hard to drag. The house was gone, burned to the ground. Nothing was left of it but a ruin of black cinders, fallen beams and broken glass, smoke stains corrupting the ornaments of the neighboring homes. Researching the fire online, I saw that no one knew how the fire began, but it was the largest the neighborhood had seen in decades. One person had died, scratching at the front door, trying to get free.

  Chapter 7

  Meeting the Fairy Queen

  “Through love you learned my secret name,

  Because of love I shall not hide;

  I am the darkness from whence came

  The pure Bright Spirit, hot with pride.”

  Victor H. Anderson, “Fugat spiritus meus tecum.”

  Fairies started off as nature goddesses, Old World guardians of the forests, mountains, and virgin springs. In pagan times, fairies were local manifestations of the Mother Goddess, she who was both creator and destroyer. Just as nature herself gave birth to us, nurtured and provided for us all, she could take everything away just as easily. The Goddess was immanent in the fruit of the tree and the soil of the grave, where both human bodies and the seeds of new trees are buried. As Christianity invaded Europe, its policy was to demonize the fairy spirits. Under its influence, ancient goddesses of the wood and spring were diminished and made small and, sometimes, evil. But they could never be completely destroyed. The fairies lived on hidden glades and in the imaginations of the rural peasants. The epic medieval poem The Faerie Queene told the story of a beautiful woman who provided the hero with healing potions and gave him magical swords conferring monarchal authority. But she was dangerous too. In some versions, she’d seduce the king and give birth to monsters disguised as valiant knights or gifted poets. Her children seemed human, but really they were halflings; they’d have a goat leg, or one tooth curling out like a boar’s tusk, or a patch of mink fur bristling on their cheeks.

  In Italy, fata means “fate”; fairies were descendants of the Fates themselves, as in the case of Fata Morgana. In France, a fairy was a fey. The demoted goddesses of Europe appeared in countless forms: Titania, Melior, Palatyne, Mata Mari. The latter being a Basque goddess, the Lady of the Sea, bubbling up from sharp corals and kelp forests, haloed by the moon. Titania, a wood nymph, could transform herself into a hare. To protect her forest creatures, she’d unnerve the huntsman, watching him with her nose twitching from the leaves, then dart off into the dark woods that psychologist Carl Jung says represents the collective unconscious.

  In the tales of the medieval period, the two most famous fairies were Melusine and Morgan le Fay. Like her descendent the Little Mermaid, Melusine was a lover and a mermaid herself, who wanted “to be where the people are.” She married a prince. But he broke their pact (fairies are fond of pacts) when he spied on her in the bath. He saw her gleaming legs grow scaly and become the squirming tail of a snake. His betrayal brought both himself and his entire land to ruin.

  Melusine’s cousin Morgan le Fay made her most significant appearances in the Arthurian legends. Associated both with the crow-headed Morrígan, warrior goddesses of Celtic Ireland, and with the Lady of the Lake, she was a sword carrier and swamp dweller with hair down to her waist. She pushed through the marsh reeds on a boat draped in handwoven rugs, strung with lanterns and dripping candles, sailing to the Isle of Apple Trees, also known as Avalon.

  Both Morgan le Fay and Melusine came from Avalon. To get there, you enter through the mouth of a cave. This fairy queendom was an underworld land of ten thousand women, a place of perpetual summer, where the flowers were always in bloom. Also called the Land of the Shining Ones, its geography a lattice of secret lakes, glowing orbs, crystal castles, and jeweled mountains. In the Land of the Shining Ones, jewels are always mined by dwarves who love their work. In the fairy world, unpleasant labor doesn’t exist. Fairies tantalize their lovers with a promise to put an
end to their drudgery. They can spin straw into gold. They can assemble a complicated line of leather shoes with a tip of the hat. Let yourself be seduced, they croon. Fall asleep in their fairy circle and you’ll wake up at one of their endless parties, ecstatic. Until one day you realize you don’t know how to get back home. But then, why would you want to? Maybe because the Summerland is synonymous with the grave. Avalon, land of infinite beauty and freedom, is less free and beautiful once you realize you can never leave.

  Whether nature spirit or seductive demon, fairies have had a lasting influence on the Western imagination. The West Coast witchcraft tradition of Reclaiming, from which my mother draws her greatest influence, has its roots in the Faery, sometimes called Feri, practices of the blind poet and shaman Victor Anderson. Based in San Francisco, the Faery Witch tradition is a nature religion. Its rites require the initiate to call upon the elemental spirits, the gnomes of the earth, the water undines, the sylphs riding the wind like dandelion fluff, the salamanders twisting in the bonfire.

  Fairies don’t just inspire us; they still exist. Long ago they mated with mortals; their genes still travel through our bloodlines. Some of us just inherit a little bit: a gap in the teeth, a pointed ear, a crooked finger. But sometimes the recessive fairy gene appears in pure form and a full-blown fairy creature pushes forth from between the legs of a mortal woman.

  The Jewelry Store was in the Mission District, not too far from my new apartment. I’d found out about it when three women, three Fates in loose pants and slouchy dance shirts, caught me on the traffic median as I was walking across the street. One cupped my face as the other ran her fingers down my arms and along the back of my neck. “Come to the Jewelry Store this Friday,” the gray-eyed brunette told me, stuffing a flyer into my palm. “We’re performing The Enchanted Garden of the Empress Zoë.”